Technology
Why Scott Painter Is Selling His Beach House to Start a New Vehicle Software Company
Serial entrepreneur Scott Painter’s plan to construct an all-electric subscription automotive company called Autonomy has backfired, so he’s back on what he calls the “hardest build” of his profession.
While Autonomy will proceed to operate the small fleet of 1,000 cars it has amassed over the past few years (a far cry from its stated goal of 23,000), Painter is starting a recent company called Autonomy Data Services, or ADS for brief, he told TechCrunch in an exclusive interview.
The recent company will provide a software platform and data to automakers looking to run their very own subscription services for electric, gas, recent and even used cars. Painter says he’s also in talks with automotive dealers, fleet operators and even firms that sell construction and agricultural equipment but might want to offer subscriptions. He says an early version of the service is already generating revenue.
Painter says ADS is in negotiations with multiple automakers, including three which have previously operated their very own subscription service. The company is partnering with Deloitte to run the service; ADS will get a share of the revenue as a software-as-a-service provider, while Deloitte will charge automakers (or other customers) for customizing the platform.
It’s one other twist for Painter, who has had a difficult few years. After stepping down as CEO of automotive retailer TrueCar in 2015 (a company he founded in 2005), he launched automotive leasing startup Fair, which has received greater than $300 million in funding from SoftBank. That’s over poorlyEarly investors accused SoftBank of leading the corporate into failure, and Painter ultimately resigned as CEO in 2021.
His last shift wasn’t easy either.
To make all of it occur, Painter had to persuade Autonomy’s investors, a few of whom were underwater when the subscription service never took off as promised.
“Our lenders had something called senior secured status; they could kill the company and try to liquidate the fleet” to get a few of their a refund, he says. But he worked with them to convert $32 million of debt in Autonomy into equity in ADS.
He also says he had to “do some personal digging,” including selling his $6 million beach house on Pacific Coast Highway, mortgage one other property and “sell a lot of assets I didn’t want to sell.”
“It was the hardest job I’ve ever done as an entrepreneur,” he says, describing the method as “hugging a cactus.”
Data takeover for a six-figure sum
Autonomy was already struggling last yr when Elon Musk’s aggressive price cutting destroyed it the worth of a small fleetmost of them were Teslas. (Painter, who knows Musk personally, says he tried to “instill in Elon the importance of being more predictable with discounts,” but to no avail.)
The problem this time is that the majority major automakers have already tried subscription services. And just about all of them have abandoned the concept.
Painter says that happened because automakers “didn’t yet have the fidelity or understanding of how subscriptions would work.” Because all of those subscription services from automakers were brand recent, he says, they didn’t understand how customers would behave. Would they subscribe for just a few months? Or a few years?
Without that information, it’s really hard to set prices, Painter says, which is why automakers have charged high prices for his or her subscription services, scaring customers away.
That kind of knowledge is one in every of the things it plans to offer through ADS. And it’s not only coming from Autonomy customers. Painter quietly bought the assets of bankrupt used-car marketplace Shift Technologies earlier this yr for lower than $1 million. In the years leading up to its demise, Shift bought Painter’s former car-leasing startup Fair, which had previously acquired Ford’s subscription service Canvas—returning the remnants of its former business to its own ownership—and Uber’s leasing service Xchange.
Data from all of those firms may be used to predict “how long people stay in their cars based on their customer cohort, what their FICO score is, how much income they have, and so on and so forth,” Painter says. That’s essential not only since it provides certainty, but additionally because the flexibleness of subscription services is attractive to customers with lower credit scores.
Painter says that as well as to customer data, he obtained all source code, patents, trademarks, and compliance and legal “work product” from these bankrupt firms, which he says should make it much easier for ADS to relaunch its business for patrons in recent markets.
In total, he says he received greater than a terabyte, jokingly calling it “an astonishing avalanche of sh—.”
“My IT people were just saying, ‘What are you going to do with all this?’ It just kept coming,” he says. But, he notes, the businesses that generated all that data “spent a combined $1 billion developing the software” he now owns and uses at ADS.
“I mean, when (SoftBank CEO) Masayoshi Son finds out that I managed to buy all of Fair’s assets and intellectual property for less than a million dollars, I mean, it’s just going to kill him,” he jokes.
And while he has raised $2.5 million in enterprise funding, the work isn’t done. “We’ve done everything we need to do to make (ADS) an investable business. Now we’re just looking for an equity partner who’s willing to put in $5 million to $8 million,” he says. “That gives the company two years to get up and running so it can continue to grow with Deloitte.”
Technology
The company is currently developing washing machines for humans
Forget about cold baths. Washing machines for people may soon be a brand new solution.
According to at least one Japanese the oldest newspapersOsaka-based shower head maker Science has developed a cockpit-shaped device that fills with water when a bather sits on a seat in the center and measures an individual’s heart rate and other biological data using sensors to make sure the temperature is good. “It also projects images onto the inside of the transparent cover to make the person feel refreshed,” the power says.
The device, dubbed “Mirai Ningen Sentakuki” (the human washing machine of the longer term), may never go on sale. Indeed, for now the company’s plans are limited to the Osaka trade fair in April, where as much as eight people will have the option to experience a 15-minute “wash and dry” every day after first booking.
Apparently a version for home use is within the works.
Technology
Zepto raises another $350 million amid retail upheaval in India
Zepto has secured $350 million in latest financing, its third round of financing in six months, because the Indian high-speed trading startup strengthens its position against competitors ahead of a planned public offering next yr.
Indian family offices, high-net-worth individuals and asset manager Motilal Oswal invested in the round, maintaining Zepto’s $5 billion valuation. Motilal co-founder Raamdeo Agrawal, family offices Mankind Pharma, RP-Sanjiv Goenka, Cello, Haldiram’s, Sekhsaria and Kalyan, in addition to stars Amitabh Bachchan and Sachin Tendulkar are amongst those backing the brand new enterprise, which is India’s largest fully national primary round.
The funding push comes as Zepto rushes so as to add Indian investors to its capitalization table, with foreign ownership now exceeding two-thirds. TechCrunch first reported on the brand new round’s deliberations last month. The Mumbai-based startup has raised over $1.35 billion since June.
Fast commerce sales – delivering groceries and other items to customers’ doors in 10 minutes – will exceed $6 billion this yr in India. Morgan Stanley predicts that this market shall be value $42 billion by 2030, accounting for 18.4% of total e-commerce and a pair of.5% of retail sales. These strong growth prospects have forced established players including Flipkart, Myntra and Nykaa to cut back delivery times as they lose touch with specialized delivery apps.
While high-speed commerce has not taken off in many of the world, the model seems to work particularly well in India, where unorganized retail stores are ever-present.
High-speed trading platforms are creating “parallel trading for consumers seeking convenience” in India, Morgan Stanley wrote in a note this month.
Zepto and its rivals – Zomato-owned Blinkit, Swiggy-owned Instamart and Tata-owned BigBasket – currently operate on lower margins than traditional retail, and Morgan Stanley expects market leaders to realize contribution margins of 7-8% and adjusted EBITDA margins to greater than 5% by 2030. (Zepto currently spends about 35 million dollars monthly).
An investor presentation reviewed by TechCrunch shows that Zepto, which handles greater than 7 million total orders every day in greater than 17 cities, is heading in the right direction to realize annual sales of $2 billion. It anticipates 150% growth over the following 12 months, CEO Aadit Palicha told investors in August. The startup plans to go public in India next yr.
However, the rapid growth of high-speed trading has had a devastating impact on the mom-and-pop stores that dot hundreds of Indian cities, towns and villages.
According to the All India Federation of Consumer Products Distributors, about 200,000 local stores closed last yr, with 90,000 in major cities where high-speed trading is more prevalent.
The federation has warned that without regulatory intervention, more local shops shall be vulnerable to closure as fast trading platforms prioritize growth over sustainable practices.
Zepto said it has created job opportunities for tons of of hundreds of gig employees. “From day one, our vision has been to play a small role in nation building, create millions of jobs and offer better services to Indian consumers,” Palicha said in an announcement.
Regulatory challenges arise. Unless an e-commerce company is a majority shareholder of an Indian company or person, current regulations prevent it from operating on a listing model. Fast trading corporations don’t currently follow these rules.
Technology
Wiz acquires Dazz for $450 million to expand cybersecurity platform
Wizardone of the talked about names within the cybersecurity world, is making a major acquisition to expand its reach of cloud security products, especially amongst developers. This is buying Dazzlespecialist in solving security problems and risk management. Sources say the deal is valued at $450 million, which incorporates money and stock.
This is a leap within the startup’s latest round of funding. In July, we reported that Dazz had raised $50 million at a post-money valuation of just below $400 million.
Remediation and posture management – two areas of focus for Dazz – are key services within the cybersecurity market that Wiz hasn’t sorted in addition to it wanted.
“Dazz is a leader in this market, with the best talent and the best customers, which fits perfectly into the company culture,” Assaf Rappaport, CEO of Wiz, said in an interview.
Remediation, which refers to helping you understand and resolve vulnerabilities, shapes how an enterprise actually handles the various vulnerability alerts it could receive from the network. Posture management is a more preventive product: it allows a company to higher understand the scale, shape and performance of its network from a perspective, allowing it to construct higher security services around it.
Dazz will proceed to operate as a separate entity while it’s integrated into the larger Wiz stack. Wiz has made a reputation for itself as a “one-stop shop,” and Rappaport said the integrated offering will proceed to be a core a part of it.
He believes this contrasts with what number of other SaaS corporations are built. In the safety industry, there are, Rappaport said, “a lot of Frankenstein mashups where companies prioritize revenue over building a single technology stack that actually works as a platform.” It could be assumed that integration is much more necessary in cybersecurity than in other areas of enterprise IT.
Wiz and Dazz already had an in depth relationship before this deal. Merat Bahat — the CEO who co-founded Dazz with Tomer Schwartz and Yuval Ofir (CTO and VP of R&D, respectively) — worked closely with Assaf Rappaport at Microsoft, which acquired his previous startup Adallom.
After Rappaport left to found Wiz together with his former Adallom co-founders, CTO Ami Luttwak, VP of Product Yinon Costica and VP of R&D Roy Reznik, Bahat was one in all the primary investors. Similarly, when Bahat founded Dazz, Assaf was a small investor in it.
The connection goes deeper than work colleagues. Bahat and Rappaport are also close friends, and she or he was the second family of Mickey, Rappaport’s beloved dog, referred to as Chief Dog Officer Wiz (together with LinkedIn profile). Once the deal was done, the 2 faced two very sad events: each Bahat and Mika’s mother died.
“We hope for a new chapter of positivity,” Bahat said. The cycle of life does indeed proceed.
Rumors of this takeover began to appear earlier this month; Rappaport confirmed that they then began talking seriously.
But that is not the one M&A conversation Wiz has gotten involved in. Earlier this 12 months, Google tried to buy Wiz itself for $23 billion to construct a major cybersecurity business. Wiz walked away from the deal, which might have been the biggest in Google’s history, partly because Rappaport believed Wiz could turn into a fair larger company by itself terms. And that is what this agreement goals to do.
This acquisition is a test for Wiz, which earlier this 12 months filled its coffers with $1 billion solely for M&A purposes (it has raised almost $2 billion in total, and we hear the subsequent round will close in just a few weeks). . Other offers included purchasing Gem security for $350 million, but Dazz is its largest acquisition ever.
More mergers and acquisitions could also be coming. “We believe next year will be an acquisition year for us,” Rappaport said.
In an interview with TC, Luttwak said that one in all Wiz’s priorities now’s to create more tools for developers that have in mind what they need to do their jobs.
Enterprises have made significant investments in cloud services to speed up operations and make their IT more agile, but this shift has include a significantly modified security profile for these organizations: network and data architectures are more complex and attack surfaces are larger, creating opportunities for malicious hackers to find ways to to hack into these systems. Artificial intelligence makes all of this far more difficult when it comes to malicious attackers. (It’s also a chance: the brand new generation of tools for our defense relies on artificial intelligence.)
Wiz’s unique selling point is its all-in-one approach. Drawing data from AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and other cloud environments, Wiz scans applications, data and network processes for security risk aspects and provides its users with a series of detailed views to understand where these threats occur, offering over a dozen products covering the areas, corresponding to code security, container environment security, and provide chain security, in addition to quite a few partner integrations for those working with other vendors (or to enable features that Wiz doesn’t offer directly).
Indeed, Wiz offered some extent of repair to help prioritize and fix problems, but as Luttwak said, the Dazz product is solely higher.
“We now have a platform that actually provides a 360-degree view of risk across infrastructure and applications,” he said. “Dazz is a leader in attack surface management, the ability to collect vulnerability signals from the application layer across the entire stack and build the most incredible context that allows you to trace the situation back to engineers to help with remediation.”
For Dazz’s part, once I interviewed Bahat in July 2024, when Dazz raised $50 million at a $350 million valuation, she extolled the virtues of constructing strong solutions and this week said the third quarter was “amazing.”
“But market dynamics are what trigger these types of transactions,” she said. She confirmed that Dazz had also received takeover offers from other corporations. “If you think about the customers and joint customers that we have with Wiz, it makes sense for them to have it on one platform.”
And a few of Dazz’s competitors are still going it alone: Cyera, like Dazz, an authority in attack surface management, just yesterday announced a rise of $300 million at a valuation of $5 billion (which confirms our information). But what’s going to he do with this money? Make acquisitions, after all.
Wiz says it currently has annual recurring revenue of $500 million (it has a goal of $1 billion ARR next 12 months) and has greater than 45% of its Fortune 100 customers. Dazz said ARR is within the tens of hundreds of thousands of dollars and currently growing 500% on a customer base of roughly 100 organizations.
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